Four lines is not much room for a philosophy of life, but Robert Herrick makes it enough. "To Enjoy the Time" reads like a tiny sermon that never sounds like one. Be happy now, because the fates allow it, because everyone must cross the "fatal ferry" sooner or later, and because life is already spinning away. The central idea is the old advice to seize the day, squeezed into a single breath.
Everything hangs on the first word, "While." Happiness is offered here as a window of time that stays open only as long as the "fates permit." The verb is quietly deflating, since even our cheerfulness needs permission from higher powers. Yet the speaker doesn't sound frightened. "Let's be merry" is casual, almost like someone raising a glass, and the contraction and the plural "us" turn the line into an invitation to a companion rather than an order. "Merry" is a small, homely word. Herrick doesn't ask for ecstasy or glory, only for ordinary good cheer.
The second line brings in death, but obliquely. "Pass all we must the fatal ferry" twists normal word order (we might paraphrase it as "all of us must pass the fatal ferry"), and the tangle gives the line a hurried feel, as if the speaker is waving the unpleasant fact aside. Death is never named. It becomes a crossing by boat, something everyone takes in turn, like a commuter route. The word "fates" in line one and the ferry here suggest, judging by the imagery, that Herrick's mind is on the classical underworld rather than a Christian heaven or hell. The sound does some work as well. "Fates," "fatal" and "ferry" all share that soft, breathy f, so the idea of destiny runs through the lines like a repeated tolling.
The rhyme scheme is two couplets, and the shift between them is the poem's most interesting piece of craftsmanship. The first pair, "merry" and "ferry," is a double rhyme. Each word has a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, which gives a bouncy, faintly comic effect. Rhyming "merry" with "ferry" puts the party and the grave side by side in sound before the mind has time to object. In the second couplet, "away" and "day," the rhymes are single and firm, and each line loses a syllable. The first two lines run to nine syllables, the last two to eight. The bounce drains out and the poem lands on a flat, final beat. The form shortens, as the poem says life does.
The closing image is one of circling motion. "Whirls away" means both to spin and to vanish, so speed and loss arrive in a single verb. A whirl is also what dancers do, which links merriment and mortality again, since both are ways of being swept along. "With the rotation of the day" then slows the line for a moment with its long, Latinate word "rotation," so that we almost hear a wheel turning, before the plain, short "day" shuts it. The small word "too" in "this our life, too" lines human life up with the daily turning of the sky. The poem leaves unsaid the difference between them, that the day comes round again and our life does not. We are left to feel that gap ourselves.
What gives the poem its significance is how much it does without anything extra. There are no roses, lovers or wine, none of the usual scenery of poems urging us to enjoy ourselves. The argument is stripped down to its logic: time is moving, so be glad while you can. The tone matters just as much. Herrick answers mortality with lightness rather than despair or denial, and the cheerfulness is more convincing for coming with the ferry already in sight. The brevity helps too. The poem is over almost before we have settled into it, and that makes it a small demonstration of its own point.